Lenovo Ideapad S10-2

Introduction

This is a template for a future guide to running Linux with the Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 laptop. If you have the Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 and are running Linux on it please consider editing this page or adding a comment below with your compatibility details. By contributing you will help other people running this laptop or trying to make a decision on whether to buy it or not.

Notes

In Ubuntu Neetbook Remix, install firmware not free, that system sugest. The mic works, need to change to “mic 2” in sond mixer (kmix, amix …). All works fine, have like 4 hours battery; i'm not tested the sim card.

Summary

You can enter a summary of how well the Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 works with Linux here.

Have updated to 11.04 on both, (tried 11.10 but it sux) happy to hold the fort on 11.04.
Both machines perform better on linux than they did on windows.
The s10-2 travels about with me a lot due to its small size and great battery life and now with linux doesnt need delousing and tuning every second day

Terry, 2011/11/13 12:17

My S10-2 loaded up with Ubuntu 9.04, (dual booted with xp) and ran sweet, no problems. I loved it so much I took the chance and loaded my old T43 with same. Suprise, my bluetooth started to work, (didnt know the old beast had one)

Have updated to 11.04 on both, (tried 11.10 but it sux) happy to hold the fort on 11.04.Both machines perform better on linux than they did on windows. The s10-2 travels about with me a lot due to its small size and great battery life and now with linux doesnt need delousing and tuning every second day.

TinyTimmyTeddy, 2010/05/24 15:08

On Ubuntu 10.04 all works out of the box.

Two small problems:When activating CPU frequency monitor in panel it only shows 1.3GHz at max (100%) although processor is rightly identified as N280@1.66GHz in system monitor and dmesg.

Another issue is the handling of wifi/3g or wimax cards. In order to activate 3g I got to activate it in Windows. When either of the modules (wifi or 3g: both cannot be activated at the same time) is turned off in Windows it stays this way in Ubuntu (and any other distro I've tried so far: 9.10, 9.04, sidux, CentOs, Fedora, Knoppix) and there seems to be no way of activating it in Linux.

Any suggestions (thinkpa-acpi that handels this for thinkpad models does not work with ideapad)?

After the bios update (ver. 26) everything is working fine now. Yipppiiii!

TTT

Bradomir, 2010/01/23 18:58

I have tried several Linux installs on the Lenovo S10-2:

CentOS 5: cannot identify a usb dvd/cd-rom drive. Must type “linux expert” to install properly.That was the only problem. No driver for wifi. No default software for webcam.

OpenSolaris8: no drivers for wifi or n.i.c. The ZFS file system is slow.

Fedora12: No driver for wifi. Cheese Webcam software (default) works perfectly. Attempting a pdf preview in Lyx very slow. This is probably due to the graphsics card.

Sabayon 5: Looks great but no default drivers for wifi.

Mint 8 XFCE edition: I found this distro to be the best for the S10-2. The wifi worked without having to downloaad any firmware but wicd in XFCE did not have wpa2 support that I could find.Previewing a pdf Lyx file, albeit a slight delay, was not as bad as Fedora which uses Gnome by default.

Overall, I would say any Linux version is fine but to get a performance boost with the S10-2, use XFCE or another light-weight desktop instead of Gnome or KDE, or consider upgrading (if possible) the video card and memory.

Wireless: Uses the r8169 module. It works fine, but can sometimes take over a minute to authenticate with WPA and WPA2 wireless signals.

Power management: Generally works nicely, with one glitch that I've observed. Sometimes when the computer is waking up, maybe 1/3 of the time, the GUI comes back and is responsive, then the computer goes back to sleep about 3 or 4 seconds later. My guess is that it's another problem with the wireless driver, since it takes a few seonds before it tries to re-establish the connection when the computer comes out of sleep.

The CPU jumps between different frequencies without a problem, the front SD card reader works, the webcam worked fine out of the box with the uvcvideo module.

I don't really have any more comments to make. I'm pretty happy with how Linux runs on this machine.

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